During the “Managing the Hybrid and Multi-Cloud” panel at the recent Cloud & IT Infrastructure Frontiers conference, technology leaders across industries shared how they are confronting Asia-Pacific’s most complex infrastructure challenges. The session revealed a distinct shift: As we move into 2026, the question for enterprises is no longer why to adopt the cloud, but how to architect digital infrastructure that is resilient, agile, and strategically aligned with business priorities.
Despite years of progress, the hybrid and multi-cloud journey remains fraught with risk. Vendor lock-in, uneven skill sets, and evolving data sovereignty laws remain challenging even for established organisations. The discussion underscored that success now depends less on hype and more on pragmatic design grounded in business reality.
From cost to profit
For Natalie Que, CIO and CEO for Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia at Kenvue, the cloud’s role in the enterprise has continued to evolve. “Cloud is not a cost centre, but rather a profit centre depending on the use case,” she said.
Intentionality, Que added, is critical. Not every workload belongs in the public cloud. In manufacturing, for example, legacy operational technology may be too costly or disruptive to migrate. The decision should start with the business problem: Where can cloud-native services, AI, and analytics create measurable value — through revenue growth, productivity, or efficiency gains? The goal is to direct investment to areas where technology generates real economic output.
Avoiding vendor lock-in
Several panellists raised a growing concern: the pressure from vendors retiring on-premises licences and mandating migration to their SaaS offerings. One panellist from a regional automotive group described this as being “held ransom by solution providers,” noting how the shift can erode flexibility for smaller enterprises.
This dynamic, the panel agreed, makes multi-cloud adoption a strategic necessity. Tariq Shallwani, who was Global Technical Advisor for South Asia at Equinix at the time, added that giving customers “optionality of vendors to use” helps them avoid such lock-in. He also noted that the company works closely with major cloud providers to make cloud on-ramps widely available, allowing enterprises to host data globally while maintaining portability, application performance, and compliance.
By distributing workloads across multiple providers and retaining hybrid capability, organisations can maintain flexibility and mitigate the risk of dependency on a single vendor’s pricing or policies.
Rethinking agility
Agility, the panellists emphasised, cannot be achieved by technology alone. True speed to value arises from the intersection of purpose, people, and process:
- Use case and value metric: Is the application a differentiator or a commodity? That decision determines whether it’s built internally or sourced as SaaS.
- Organisational skill set: A candid assessment of talent and capability guides whether to build, buy, or partner. How the people execute the workload is key.
- Financial transparency: Multi-cloud environments can improve visibility by isolating development from production or critical from non-critical workloads, giving CFOs clearer accountability over OPEX and budgeting.
Data and the AI challenge
As the discussion turned to AI, the panel agreed that data strategy now underpins competitive advantage. Developing models in the cloud may be straightforward, but productionising them requires a clear grasp of governance and control.
Two imperatives emerged:
- Data sovereignty and control: With tighter regulations sweeping APAC, enterprises must know precisely where data resides and how it’s used. The conversation is shifting from storage to utilisation, particularly how enterprise data may be used to train shared models that could advantage competitors.
- The rise of synthetic data: By 2030, synthetic data could surpass original data in volume, one speaker noted. This raises questions about truth and provenance. Enterprises must enforce governance mechanisms to verify the authenticity of insights driving their operations.
Cloud security in focus
The panel also discussed security, noting that its complexity deepens in a distributed cloud environment. It can no longer be an afterthought; it must be embedded into every layer of design and operation, beginning with fundamental practices that reduce risk.
Around 80% of security incidents can be prevented through consistent operational discipline. This includes educating employees, enforcing strict access controls, and maintaining business continuity and disaster recovery (BCP/DR) plans that prioritise prevention and response. The panellists agreed that these fundamentals are often overlooked, even though they address the majority of vulnerabilities enterprises face today.
Beyond internal controls, the modern enterprise must account for an extended ecosystem of dependencies. Every third-party SaaS platform, data intermediary, or integration partner adds a new dimension to the organisation’s risk profile. Contracts should therefore include a “right to audit” clause to ensure these partners uphold the same standards of governance and security as the enterprise itself.
Finally, as data moves across multiple clouds, visibility and control become critical. Shallwani added that secure, direct interconnection between environments — with observability and discoverability enabled — helps track and reduce exposure points and ensures data travels through fewer pathways. This approach, he said, reflects a broader industry shift toward strengthening trust and resilience in distributed infrastructure.
Strategy over convenience
The panel closed on a unifying message: Hybrid and multi-cloud success demands discipline. Every decision, from workload placement to vendor contracts, must serve a measurable business outcome.
The participants urged enterprises to confront the hard questions: What is the actual value being created? What are the risks, from vendors as much as from cyberthreats? Does the workforce have the capability to deliver? And where does the data truly live?
These insights show that the future of enterprise cloud in Asia-Pacific will belong to those who design for flexibility, control, and long-term alignment between business and technology.
Editor’s note: This interview was first published in Frontier Enterprise 2026.
